Gun Machine - Softcover

GUN MACHINE redraws the crime map of Manhattan; Ellis's bizarre, febrile imagination and mordant wit makes a serial killer thriller for a new century. * Charles Stross * GUN MACHINE is packing heat: wonderfully demented misfits, killer dialogue, a helluva story. Warren Ellis is a twisted genius and this is his grittiest, sexiest, and best work by far. * Lauren Beukes * Sharp, dangerous, beautifully observed... Some things about Warren Ellis's writing never change, including - I imagine - his ability to make even maniacs worry that they're boringly sane. * Jon Courtenay Grimwood * Underneath the pyrotechnic prose lies a perfectly paced mystery thriller. Ellis gets it so right. * Mike Carey * GUN MACHINE never lets go of the reader and never flags in its relentless pace. In the course of 300 tightly wound pages, Ellis unloads a full clip of ideas, black humor, character, and copper-sheathed action scenes. Every sentence is a bullseye. * Joe Hill * A mad police procedural just north of the border of dark fantasy. Delightful. * William Gibson * Hellish fun * Ian Rankin * Never stops to draw breath. It's a monster of a book, bowel-looseningly scary in places, darkly uproarious in others, and remorseless as the killer who hunts in its pages...particularly good, even by the high standards of a Warren Ellis tale. * Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing * Just about everything in GUN MACHINE, Warren Ellis's dark but pleasingly quirky crime thriller, is a little bit off, not quite what you'd expect...In his way Tallow is almost as weird as the hunter, and yet he's also oddly endearing, so single-minded you can't help rooting for him. * New York Times * Ellis tackles the police procedural, although it's bloodier and more intriguing than any episode of Law & Order or CSI, and arms it with gallows humor, high-tension action scenes and an unlikely hero. * USA Today * '[Ellis] turns to conventional crime fiction with startling success...powerful writing and vast imagination' * The Times * Sick, slick and very funny...[Ellis] doesn't need pictures to create his gripping, grave new world * Daily Telegraph * A dazzling oasis in the desert of grimly identical police procedurals * Financial Times * If only other police procedurals had half the gumption and imaginative power of this novel. * Big Issue * GUN MACHINE sees Ellis grab hold of the mainstream by its windpipe and demand acceptance; a perfectly flawless crime book with a feral glint in its eye. * Independent on Sunday * A magnificently entertaining gun held to the head of the crime thriller genre * Guardian *

This morning Detective John Tallow was bored with his job. Then there was this naked guy with a shotgun, and his partner getting killed, and now Tallow has a real problem: an apartment full of guns. Old guns. Modified guns. Arranged in rows and spirals on the floor and walls. Hundreds of them. Each weapon is tied to a single unsolved murder. Which means Tallow has uncovered two decades' worth of homicides that no one knew to connect and a killer unlike anything that came before. Tallow's bosses don't want him to solve the case. The murderer just wants him to die. But there's a pattern hiding behind the deaths, and if Tallow can figure it out he might even make it out alive.